Patient Partners in Continuing Professional Development: Experience Developing an End-of-Life Care Program for Family Physicians

Abstract

Involvement of patients in continuing professional development (CPD) is less developed than in health professional education at undergraduate or postgraduate levels. Although patients are sometimes involved in delivering CPD, they are less likely to be involved in education planning. At our institution, patients have sometimes acted as consultants in the design of CPD. The problem we address is how to engage patients as partners throughout the design process. We applied principles of authentic patient engagement and lessons learned from patient involvement in undergraduate health professional education to the design of CPD for family physicians. We created a partnership between the CPD Office and Patient and Community Partnership for Education, a unit with a history of patient involvement in the education of health professional students. Practices for meaningful involvement were identified through literature review, environmental scan, and interviewing key informants, including patients involved in health professional education at the university. These principles and practices were applied to the development of a CPD module on end-of-life care. Patient partners contributed new perspectives and some CPD providers reassessed components of their own practice as a result. Lessons learned include the need for stakeholder buy-in; mechanisms to identify those patients best able to contribute expertise; ways to facilitate involvement that work for both patients and CPD providers; the importance of feedback mechanisms to patient partners; and recognition for patient contributions. CPD offices should view integration of patient partners in program planning as an opportunity to engage in ongoing quality improvement.

Structured Engagement of Community Partners to Revise a Pregnancy Options Counseling Curriculum for Pediatric Residents

“…10 Few previous studies describe a methodology for incorporating patient and other partner perspectives in curriculum design specifically. 6,7 Our collaborators reported positive experiences of engagement in the project through our evaluation process, indicating the feasibility and acceptability of our methodology. The methodology that we describe in this article could serve as a model for future partnerengaged medical education curriculum development projects.…”

“…Engagement of community partners, including patients, is increasingly recognized as an important step in developing medical education curricula. [3][4][5][6][7] Community partnerships can align curriculum objectives and content with the priorities, needs, and experiences of key groups including patients, community members, and multidisciplinary healthcare professionals. Yet, few studies describe how to incorporate such partners in curriculum design.…”

“…Yet, few studies describe how to incorporate such partners in curriculum design. 6 , 7 Prior work has largely focused on incorporating patients as educators of teaching sessions. 3 , 6 In this article, we describe our approach to community partner engagement in the development and revision of an educational curriculum for pregnancy options counseling for pediatric residents and our evaluation of the collaboration process.…”

Patient Involvement in CPD: Provocations and Possibilities

“…Although burnout has often been treated as a provider problem, this group highlights the phenomenon of patient burnout while drawing attention to cocreated care experiences. Tajani et al 12 demonstrate how the principles of patient engagement developed in undergraduate and postgraduate education might be applied in the field of CPD. Describing how patients were involved in the development of a CPD module on end of life care, the authors argue that the integration of patient partners creates an opportunity for ongoing quality improvement in CPD.…”

Learning from and with Patients: The Role of Culture

“…Cultural ideologies and beliefs are also important to consider when we call for formal patient involvement in CPD [ 7 , 8 ]. Unfortunately, literature on patient involvement does not always seem to take the role of culture into account [ 8 ] [ 9 , 10 ];, and even seems to promote a one-size-fits-all approach [ 8 ]which may not align with the diverse cultural contexts and goals of individuals involved.…”